Biodiversity and Conservation

1. Assessing the conservation value of secondary forests and reforestation is important for conservation planning. Butterflies are widely used as indicators, and fruit-feeding butterflies are often used in biodiversity assessments in tropical landscapes. 2. We examined fruit-feeding butterfly diversity, abundance, and community composition across a primary forest, a secondary forest, and a plantation forest in northern Vietnam. We sampled butterflies nearly monthly during one year using baited traps. 3. Primary and secondary forest supported higher species richness than plantation forest. Moreover, while secondary forest had mainly a subset of species found in primary forest, the plantation forest had a distinct butterfly fauna. 4. Butterfly abundance and community composition varied across months, without showing a clear seasonal pattern. 5. Our results suggest that secondary and plantation forests do not fully replace primary forests, but they contribute meaningfully to butterfly conservation in human-modified tropical landscapes.

Over the past two decades, significant population recoveries of tigers and leopards have driven a substantial rise in human-carnivore conflict across South Asia. Sustaining the long-term conservation of both species demands effective, adaptive conflict management. However, existing research is largely confined to isolated landscapes or protected areas, hindering the identification of spatial conflict drivers across broader, heterogeneous regions. To address this gap, this study compiled 4,457 human leopard conflict (HLC) and 2,563 human tiger conflict (HTC) records spanning 2000 to 2024 across Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal. We evaluated conflict locations against 33 landscape, anthropogenic, climatic, topographic, and hydrological predictors across three spatial scales using binomial generalized linear regression models and three alternative background sampling methods. Model performance peaked at the largest spatial scale for both species and remained consistent across sampling strategies. HTC correlated positively with forest fragmentation and proximity to human settlements, but decreased with higher overall anthropogenic disturbance. Conversely, HLC concentrated in highly productive, high-precipitation, human-modified landscapes. These contrasting spatial patterns highlight distinct ecological responses to habitat modification and carry unique conservation implications. Ultimately, this study underscores the need to integrate carnivore abundance, wild prey densities, and socioeconomic factors to achieve a holistic understanding of conflict dynamics.

BACKGROUND: The Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) is among the world's worst invasive species. In the Donana Biological Reserve (Spain), it is associated with human structures that provide the mild, moist conditions it needs within the hot, dry scrubland. We evaluated a habitat-modification treatment, predicting that removing this suitable habitat would eradicate the invader locally. Over an 18-year period, we monitored ant communities at a treated and an untreated site, at different distances from the human structures, before and after treatment, and analysed how temperature and worker numbers affected encounters at baits between the Argentine ant and native ants. RESULTS: Distance to the human structures shaped ant communities at both sites, but only the treated site changed after treatment. There, the Argentine ant decreased close to the human structure and almost disappeared farther from it, whereas the endemic Cataglyphis tartessica and C. floricola recovered, especially close to the structure. At baits, the outcome of encounters depended mainly on how temperature changes favoured each species relative to its maximum activity temperature: Cataglyphis spp. displaced the Argentine ant in the morning, as temperature increased, and the Argentine ant recovered the baits in the late afternoon. Numerical advantage favoured only the Argentine ant. CONCLUSION: Habitat modification reduced the Argentine ant and allowed endemic ants to recover, but did not eradicate the invader, which persisted at low abundance 13 years after treatment. In protected areas, habitat management should be combined with eradication, monitoring and prevention of spread.

The Peruvian Andes, and especially its slopes towards the Amazonian Basin are well-known biodiversity hotspots for plants and animals, which represent the visible part of biodiversity. However, not much is known about microeukaryotic diversity, despite the significant role protists play in the ecosystem. Based on a molecular survey of the diversity of Arcellinida (a group of amoebae well known for its environmental sensitivity and restricted geographical distributions), we estimated its diversity along an elevation gradient spanning more than 3000 meters. Surprisingly, Neotropical forest Arcellinida were less abundant and diverse than in most other extratropical biomes; nevertheless, communities differed strongly in their taxonomic composition as compared with forests in higher latitudes. Notably, sequences related to Trigonopyxis were most abundant, whereas this group occurs only marginally in extratropical settings. Elevation influenced beta diversity, showing different assembly processes occurring at different elevation belts. Canopy cover positively influenced both phylogenetic and taxonomic diversity, showing the importance of above and below ground integration in tropical forests.

Climate change will alter habitat suitability for plant communities in mountain ecosystems of the Western Himalaya. There will be contrasting magnitudes and spatial configurations of these changes for different plant species, and it is an important question how to translate these contrasts into effective climate-proof multi-species conservation planning. This study assessed current habitat associations and projected changes in suitable habitat for two contrasting species, Meconopsis aculeata and Rhododendron campanulatum, in Himachal Pradesh, India. Field surveys and spatially filtered occurrence records were combined with MaxEnt modelling using 10 non-collinear environmental predictors. Habitat suitability was projected to 2050 and 2070 under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways; SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 using HadGEM3-GC31-LL. Field observations showed contrasting habitat associations, with M. aculeata occurring mainly in open alpine herbaceous communities and R. campanulatum in subalpine woody communities. Elevation was an important predictor for both species while climatic predictors contributed differently to their relative importance and response patterns. Future projections indicated reductions in suitable habitat of approximately 25% for M. aculeata and 27-28% for R. campanulatum. Habitat-change maps showed heterogeneous patterns of loss, gain and persistence rather than uniform contraction, and centroid displacement remained small (7.7-8.5 km). We performed proximity analyses to show which currently suitable areas are most close to areas of future gain, in order to support the design of climate-proof protected areas. We discuss how interspecific differences in response are relevant to multi-species conservation planning that considers the spatial relationship between current high-suitability areas and the gain, loss and redistribution of future suitable habitat.

Information on Western bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus eurycerus) across its range remains scarce and fragmented, leaving the status of populations poorly understood, limiting effective conservation planning. We conducted three camera-trap surveys across Semuliki National Park, Uganda, between October 2019 and August 2020 (90 camera locations; 11,640 camera days), during which we detected the only currently known population of Western bongo in East Africa. We assessed the status of this population using data from the final survey (March-August 2020), when bongos were detected, applying an individual identification system adapted from Eastern bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus isaaci) and spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) modelling to estimate density and abundance. To reflect known aspects of bongo ecology, we incorporated sex and habitat covariates derived from remotely sensed data as predictors of density. Bongos were detected on 17 occasions, and we identified 18 individuals (11 females and 7 males), of which seven immature individuals (5 females and 2 males). The top-ranking SECR model included the tasseled cap greenness index and sex as predictors of density. The model estimated a population size of 56.49 individuals (SE = 7.69; 95% CI = 41.43-71.56), with an estimated density of 0.58 individuals km-2 (SE = 0.171; 95% CI = 0.32-1.09) within Semuliki National Park. These results provide the first quantitative baseline for this population and suggest the presence of an established breeding population, highlighting the need for structured monitoring to support its long-term conservation.

Fruit resource availability can influence the local abundance of avian frugivores through bottom-up regulation, but whether greater resource availability translates into higher visitation rates to fruiting trees remains poorly understood. Greater fruit availability could increase visitation by supporting larger frugivore populations, or reduce visitation to individual trees if increases in frugivore abundance are not proportionate to those in fruit availability or if frugivores distribute their foraging effort. Understanding these relationships can provide insights into the relative role of abundance and trait-based mechanisms in structuring plant-frugivore communities. We compared fruit availability, avian frugivore abundance, and frugivore visitation rates on fruiting trees across two protected wet tropical forest sites: Anamalai Tiger Reserve in the Western Ghats and Namdapha Tiger Reserve in the Eastern Himalaya. Specifically, we quantified the availability of bird-consumed fruits across one-ha patches, estimated local abundances of major frugivore groups, and tested whether visitation rates on individual fruiting trees were related to frugivore abundance, body mass, and degree of frugivory. We found that small-seeded fruit availability was significantly higher in Anamalai than in Namdapha. Local abundances of several relatively small-bodied frugivore groups, including bulbuls, barbets, fairy-bluebirds, and mynas, were also higher in Anamalai. However, visitation rates of several frugivore groups on individual fruiting trees were higher in Namdapha. Visitation rates across all avian frugivore species were associated with frugivore abundances only in Anamalai, and not associated with body mass or degree of frugivory in either site. Thus, although greater fruit availability was likely associated with higher frugivore abundance, this increase in abundance did not consistently translate into higher visitation rates at individual fruiting trees, which provides some support for the resource dilution hypothesis. Our results highlight the importance of considering fruit resource availability and frugivore abundance when examining variation in tropical plant-frugivore interactions.

Aim: Given that much of Earth's biodiversity is contained within species, inferring intraspecific genetic diversity and identifying its ecological correlates is essential for understanding evolutionary processes and informing conservation. Here, we investigate broad-scale variation in species-level mitochondrial genetic diversity and evaluate the relative importance of alternative ecological hypotheses proposed to explain it. Location: Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Iberian Peninsula, northwestern Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Madagascar and Australian Monsoonal Tropics. Taxon: Amphibians and reptiles Methods: We assembled a comprehensive dataset by integrating and manually curating mitochondrial sequences, occurrence records, environmental data and species traits from multiple open-access sources. We used multiple mitochondrial genes to estimate mean nucleotide diversity for each study species and quantified regional variation in genetic diversity. We then used random forests models to evaluate the relative importance of selected variables representing hypotheses related to water-energy availability, topography, historical climatic stability, land-cover characteristics, species geographic characteristics, life-history traits, evolutionary history and conservation status. Results: The final dataset comprised 247 amphibians and 295 reptiles, for which 43 and 52 explanatory variables were evaluated, respectively. Overall, the strongest support was found for hypotheses related to life-history traits, topographic heterogeneity and water-energy availability. In amphibians, higher genetic diversity was associated with smaller body size and greater environmental heterogeneity, particularly broader elevational and precipitation gradients. In reptiles, genetic diversity was primarily associated with life-history traits, with species of smaller body size and lower reproductive output exhibiting higher diversity. Long-term climatic stability showed comparatively little explanatory power for both taxa. Main conclusions: Our comprehensive study demonstrates that integrating extensive manual data curation with comparative macrogenetic analyses provides a robust framework for identifying broad-scale ecological correlates of mitochondrial genetic diversity. These findings improve our understanding of the factors associated with contemporary patterns of genetic diversity and provide a foundation for future conservation assessments in data-limited systems.

Aims In forest ecosystems, tree species composition and diversity are fundamental drivers of biodiversity and many species are closely associated to specific tree species as hosts. Saproxylic diversity across tree species may be shaped by interactions between ecological and environmental factors, such as resource availability. However, a throughout and unbiased quantification of diversity across tree species is missing. We investigated patterns an drivers of saproxylic beetle diversity across European tree genera while accounting for differences in sampling effort. Location Europe Methods We used a large dataset, of 25 studies, comprising 500,000 deadwood-dependent beetles, representing 1041 saproxylic beetle species, sampled from 29 tree genera. We accounted for sampling effort by estimating diversity using coverage-based standardization across Hill numbers. We than used linear models to identify drivers of saproxylic beetle diversity across tree genera and assessed differences in community composition using Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling (NMDS). Additionally, the most abundant beetle families were identified for a subset of 14 genera. Results Quercus supported the highest richness of infrequent, frequent, and highly frequent species, while Fagus exhibited the highest observed (unstandardized) species richness. Beetle communities were less differentiated when focusing on infrequent species, whereas tree genera were separated when focusing on frequent and highly frequent species. In addition, we found that resource availability and maximum tree height best predicted infrequent beetle diversity, whereas resource availability was the main driver of frequent species. In contrast, the same analyses for unstandardized data indicated postglacial occurrence as an important factor for infrequent species. Main conclusions Although resource availability supported the species area hypothesis, standardized data revealed higher richness on smaller trees, partly contradicting this pattern. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for sampling bias and promoting tree diversity, particularly oaks, to sustain saproxylic beetle diversity.

Information on the long-term dynamics of species distributions is essential for assessing global biodiversity change and its causes, and for informed conservation decisions. A valuable source of such historical information are atlases. They provide spatial standardisation, extensive geographic coverage, temporal replication, documented sampling protocols, and span multiple species. Here we present model-based occupancy probabilities for 1,055 bird and 58 butterfly species, derived from nine gridded atlas datasets spanning several editions over the past 50 years. These are: Japan, New Zealand, New York state (US), the states of Alberta, Quebec, and The Maritimes (Canada), Czech Republic, United Kingdom, and Europe. Despite standardisation and coordination during data collection, the raw atlas data still contain some variation in sampling effort. We accounted for this using a two-step process: (1) we estimated a proxy for sampling effort in each grid cell within each atlas period using the Frescalo Algorithm, and (2) we ran a Bayesian spatial occupancy model for each species and atlas period, using the estimated sampling effort as the single predictor of detection in the observation process of the model. As the main product, we provide occupancy probabilities for species across grid cells and atlas periods. We also report uncertainty around each probability estimate and flag ~21% (rare) species per atlas for which the model did not fit well. The probability distributions are fit for purpose and served in a user-friendly database with standardised geographic projection, metadata, and taxonomy.

Exotic species can reshape native communities, in the extreme, to local extirpation. Before that, natives may adjust where and when they use the landscape, in ways that allow coexistence and may be the earliest sign of trouble. Distinguishing coexistence built on such adjustment from one built on pre-existing niche differences requires comparing a native where the invader is absent with the same native where it is present, across sites at different invasion stages. Using eight years (2018-2026) of camera-trap data from 103 stations across Uruguay (154,590 camera-nights), we asked how the invasive axis deer (Axis axis) affects the space and time use of two native cervids: the forest-dwelling brown brocket (Subulo gouazoubira) and the grassland-restricted pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus). Activity-overlap, directional-avoidance, hierarchical activity, and two-species occupancy analyses showed sharply divergent dyads. A. axis and S. gouazoubira shared forest yet segregated in space and along the understory stratum the brocket requires and the invader avoids, and shifted their diel activity by context; understory cover fell with A. axis abundance, consistent with habitat modification. For A. axis and O. bezoarticus, segregation was intrinsic, opposite diel niches and habitats, with no support for a detectable shift in pampas deer behavior. The only behavioral signal was asymmetric: the invader, rather than the native, appeared to adjust, though few shared sites warrant caution. The same invader thus drives different mechanisms, but coexistence is provisional: A. axis is still expanding, far from equilibrium, so these shifts read best as early warning signals.

Megadiverse countries concentrate most of the World's biodiversity. These countries encompass different levels of research infrastructure, and nearly all of them have been historically committed to the Convention of Biological Diversity, often setting precedents and leading new approaches. Here, we ask whether the assessment of genetic diversity indicators provide novel insights for biodiversity management and conservation in one of those countries, Mexico. We evaluated the first national application of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), genetic diversity indicators in Mexico. The data covered 97 taxa across diverse ecosystem types and taxonomic groups, including crop wild relatives, to assess the capacity of genetic diversity indicators to provide novel insights, as well as their relevance for strengthening national conservation strategies. We calculated two indicators: the proportion of populations with an effective population size greater than 500 (Ne 500) and the proportion of populations maintained (PM). Data were sufficient to estimate the Ne 500 indicator for 47 taxa and the PM for 28 taxa, with mean indicator values of 0.217 and 0.936, respectively. Species' geographic range was positively associated with Ne 500, whereas national endemicity had no significant effect. Comparisons with the IUCN Red List and Mexico's national extinction-risk legislation revealed that genetic vulnerability occurs even among taxa not currently recognized as threatened. Our findings highlight a gap in legal recognition of genetic diversity protection that could be strengthened by incorporating population-level assessments focused on maintaining adaptive potential in the long-term. Additionally, the indicators allowed to highlight conservation concerns within crop wild relatives, though fully realizing their potential requires integrating the entire wild-to-domesticated complex. The Mexican experience highlights that the main challenge for scaling the monitoring of genetic diversity is not only generating new data, but integrating existing information into systems that strengthen collaboration and communication among researchers, local communities, and government institutions.

1. Occurrence records underpin biodiversity analyses, but their coordinates are often erroneous or missing. Misplaced coordinates distort environmental predictors and range estimates used in conservation assessment. Existing tools flag suspect records or georeference locality text, but rarely correct coordinates, provide calibrated uncertainty, or quantify downstream consequences. 2. We present GeoMend, a deterministic, rule-based method that flags and corrects suspect coordinates and georeferences records lacking coordinates from locality text, assigning each a precision tier or uncertainty radius. It uses no machine learning or artificial intelligence. We evaluate it against expert coordinates for 16,913 records and 736 species on Hispaniola, compare georeferencers using 5,000 localities from 72 countries, and measure changes in environmental predictors and the extent of occurrence. 3. On held-out Hispaniola records, GeoMend flags 92% of coordinates more than 5 km from expert truth, versus 27% for CoordinateCleaner. Among the accepted corrections with paired coordinates, the median error falls from 2.19 to 0.82 km, and 68% of the complete held-out pairs improve. On records placed by both GeoMend and GEOLocate that also have original coordinates, the median error is 0.67 km for GeoMend versus 10.69 km for GEOLocate. For records lacking coordinates, evaluated uncertainty radii contain expert truth about 92% of the time in well-supported gazetteer classes. Correction reduces the mean standardized environmental distance from expert truth by 38% and moves the extent of occurrence toward expert truth by a median of 8% (mean of 79%). Corrections and newly georeferenced records give 17 Hispaniola species their first range estimate. 4. On the global benchmark, GeoMend is more accurate than GPT-4o for two-thirds of the records placed by all four comparators, with median errors of 4.4 and 10.8 km, respectively. Applied to Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) records lacking coordinates, it places records from 82,180 previously unmapped species across 233 countries, ranging from precise locality interpretations to administrative centroids. Automated placement makes the global backlog more approachable, while explicit tiers distinguish uses supported by precise and coarse coordinates. Further georeferencing requires regional expertise to combine automated placement with local knowledge.

Reliable estimates of population size are fundamental to understanding wildlife population status and informing conservation. Obtaining such estimates remains challenging for unmarked species, particularly in tropical countries where logistical and financial constraints limit intensive monitoring. The endangered dhole (Cuon alpinus), a highly social canid without natural markings, is one such species for which robust population estimates remain scarce. We estimated dhole density in the Valparai plateau, a human-dominated agroforest-forest mosaic in India's Western Ghats. We compared Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture (SECR) models based on individual identification from fecal DNA and Space-to-Event (STE) models based on camera-trap detections. We additionally applied both approaches to individually identifiable leopards (Panthera pardus) to cross-validate STE versus SECR estimates. SECR estimated dhole density at 22 individuals per 100 sq.km, with STE estimates varying substantially depending on how the camera viewshed area was defined. STE estimates based on post hoc viewshed measurements, particularly after reducing the viewshed by 10%, were comparable to SECR estimates. In contrast, STE underestimated leopard density relative to SECR (7 versus 12 per 100 sq.km), although uncertainty intervals overlapped. Ecologically, our results indicate that human-use agroforest mosaics can support dhole densities comparable to, or exceeding, those reported from several Protected Areas, highlighting their potential importance for dhole conservation. More broadly, we argue that STE models may offer a practical and relatively inexpensive approach for baseline monitoring of dholes from camera-trap surveys, but their reliability depends strongly on accurate characterization of the effective viewshed and may vary across species and landscapes.

Palm oil is the worlds leading vegetable oil, with production continuing to expand, particularly across Southeast Asia. Within established plantations, conserving and restoring riparian margins can reduce erosion, improve connectivity, and support biodiversity. Simultaneously, climate change is increasing thermal stress within tropical agricultural landscapes, raising the potential importance of riparian buffers as microclimatic refugia, although this has not previously been evaluated. The Riparian Ecosystem Restoration in Tropical Agriculture (RERTA) Project is a long-term Before-After Control-Impact experiment established within oil palm plantations in Riau, Indonesia, to evaluate alternative riparian restoration strategies following plantation replanting. Treatments included passive restoration (retaining mature oil palms and allowing natural regeneration), active restoration (enrichment planting with six native tree species), and a control (replanting immature oil palms to the river edge). Six years after restoration, we assessed vegetation structure using terrestrial laser scanning and thermal stability using temperature loggers and thermal imaging. We also evaluated the long-term temperature buffering capacity of each treatment under current and projected climates using CHELSA climate data and downscaled outputs from multiple General Circulation Models under Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios for 2045 and 2085. Active restoration produced greater structural complexity, a more closed canopy, and cooler, more thermally stable conditions than passive restoration and control treatments. Restored margins also contained significantly more cool surface microhabitats, reducing thermal extremes under both current and future climate scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that active restoration of riparian margins can enhance thermal buffering and create microclimatic refugia for biodiversity within tropical oil palm landscapes. As agricultural intensification and climate change continue to reshape tropical ecosystems, restoring structurally complex riparian vegetation will be critical for sustaining biodiversity and the ecosystem services upon which agricultural production depends.

Arboreal camera trapping is an emerging remote sensing tool for building plant-frugivore interaction networks with enormous potential to provide new insights into seed dispersal as an eco-evolutionary process. Interaction data derived from camera trap videos broadly falls into two categories: visitation, indicating the presence of an animal in a tree, and intake, indicating true fruit consumption. These linked approximations of seed dispersal may or may not provide distinct sets of information, shaping our understanding of network dynamics, yet the extent to which emergent network structure depends on variable choice is unknown. To address this gap, we deployed camera traps in the canopy of 21 plant species in the Costa Rican tropical dry forest, an endangered biome with sparse community-wide plant-frugivore interaction data. Our objectives were: 1) Quantify plant-frugivore network structure in the tropical dry forest via network, group, and species-level metrics; and 2) Compare metrics between visitation and intake networks. We find strong structural patterns of low connectance, low nestedness, high modularity, and low niche overlap that differ significantly from null expectations in the same direction in both networks. The visitation network exhibited significantly greater modularity & species degree than the intake network, while the intake network exhibited significantly greater plant niche overlap than the visitation network. These findings suggest that the likelihood of consuming fruit on camera differs across species, which may have downstream consequences on other emerging metric estimations. Researchers seeking to build quantitative plant-frugivore networks should therefore consider visitation and intake variables in concert when relying on camera trap data. This work provides foundational plant-frugivore interaction data for a critically endangered biome and enhances our understanding of camera trapping as a remote sensing tool in frugivory and seed dispersal research.

Aim: To test whether individual movement mechanisms inferred from animal tracking data can be scaled up to explain landscape-scale patterns of population density and improve predictions of population redistribution under future environmental change. Location: Texas Gulf Coast, USA Time Period: 2009-2018 Major Taxa Studied: Whooping Crane (Grus americana) Methods: We parameterized individual-level step-selection functions using 14,898 GPS locations from 22 Whooping Cranes and propagated the resulting movement and habitat-selection mechanisms across the landscape to derive steady-state distributions of space use. We compared these movement-informed predictions with correlative species distribution models fitted to the same data. Predictions were evaluated using withheld tracking observations and fully independent population-level aerial-survey data. We then projected both approaches under sea-level-rise scenarios to assess how future habitat loss and fragmentation alter crane space use. Results: Movement mechanisms derived from individual-level tracking data captured the mechanistic dependence of population density on habitat quality and spatial configuration. When projected across the landscape, these mechanisms reproduced fully independently observed density patterns and outperformed conventional species distribution models. Because predictions arose from movement mechanisms rather than occurrence-environment correlations, movement-informed models also captured the effects of habitat reconfiguration under sea-level rise. They projected pronounced population redistribution and an expansion of core space-use areas of up to 80% which conventional models missed. Main Conclusions: Individual movement mechanisms derived from biologging data can scale up to explain current population structure and predict future redistribution under environmental change. By mechanistically accounting for how habitat configuration constrains accessibility, movement-informed models reveal severe impacts of fragmentation that are missed by conventional distribution models. Rapidly expanding biologging datasets therefore offer a scalable basis for connecting individual behavior to macroecological patterns and improving biodiversity forecasts in changing landscapes.

Soil is one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet, yet the extent of soil biodiversity knowledge in Canada is unknown. To better understand our knowledge, we systematically mapped soil invertebrate biodiversity knowledge from peer-reviewed literature to identify spatial and taxonomic gaps and to assess whether areas projected to experience different magnitudes of climate change are adequately sampled. A total of 1,176 Canadian sampling locations were identified from 427 articles. We found biases in sampling coverage spatially and in relation to current and projected climatic conditions. The geographic region above 60 degrees North is sparsely sampled. Colder regions (< -0.12 C) and regions receiving the least (< 646.47 mm), moderately high (2268.67 to 2809.40 mm), and high (2809.40 to 3350.14 mm) amounts of precipitation were under sampled. Regions projected to have the smallest (< 0.86 C) and greatest (> 1.59 C) magnitudes in temperature change and regions projected to have moderate (-2.06 to +2.69 mm) to large changes (+2.69 to +7.44 mm) in precipitation were underrepresented. The sampled locations also suffer from taxonomic biases which were skewed toward Nematoda (19%), Annelida (18%), Acari (15%), and Collembola (14%). Our results suggest that methods such as stratified sampling is essential to capture underrepresented regions, taxonomic groups, and an array of current and projected climatic conditions. Additionally, shifting to a multispecies sampling approach is essential for broader soil ecosystem knowledge. Importantly, data from well-sampled areas should be examined to determine how it can be leveraged to advance conservation management of soil invertebrates.

1. Plant populations at high elevation persist near their physiological limits, and treeline position is one of the clearest expressions of this constraint. In many mountain regions, however, this limit reflects historical land use as much as climate. Treeline shift is most often tracked as the displacement of a boundary line (1D) overlooking structural changes only visible when the ecotone is analysed as a surface (2D). 2. We reconstructed treeline ecotone dynamics at nine sites in the Italian Alps using aerial imagery from 1954 and 2017. At each site we detected the timberline and tree species line, quantified elevational displacement, and measured ecotonal surface change, relating them to climatic, land-use, and topographic predictors. 3. Both boundaries advanced upslope at all nine sites, with timberlines shifting faster (1.6 m/yr) than tree species lines (1.1 m/yr). This decoupled velocity caused the ecotonal surface to contract by ~17%. Land-use variables consistently explained more variance than climatic ones. 4. Land-use legacy and abandonment have a major role in shaping treeline dynamics. Boundary displacement reveals vegetation advance at both margins, while the surface view reveals concurrent narrowing of the habitat available for tree establishment. Both perspectives are needed to fully characterize how plant populations respond to shifting limiting factors at the treeline ecotone.

Urban protected areas (PAs) have become important habitats for wildlife in rapidly expanding human-dominated landscapes. These PAs may provide refuge and continuously abundant resources, which may enable some adaptable carnivores to persist and attain high abundances. However, little is known about the population ecology and interactions between carnivores sharing such spatially restricted and disturbed urban habitats. We evaluated the densities and spatio-temporal interactions of leopards (Panthera pardus) and striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena) in Jhalana-Amagarh Conservation Reserve, a protected area (PA) embedded within the metropolis of Jaipur, India. During May-July 2025, we deployed 30 paired camera-traps and used spatially explicit capture-recapture models to estimate density and individual activity centres. We further quantified their diel activity and temporal overlap using kernel density estimation. Leopard density was estimated at 7.03 {+/-} 1.31 individuals/10 km sq and striped hyena density at 4.06 {+/-} 0.96 individuals/10 km sq, with activity centres of both species occurring in close proximity and frequently towards the reserve periphery. Both species were predominantly nocturnal and showed high temporal overlap ({Delta}4 = 0.801, CI=0.73-0.86). Our results report exceptionally high leopard and striped hyena densities in an urban PA and exemplify the importance of small PAs within rapidly expanding cities, stressing the need for finer-scale studies more broadly to understand the mechanisms shaping interactions between the two species. However, such systems require careful management of food subsidies, habitat quality and connectivity along with long-term monitoring of population viability, disease dynamics and human-wildlife conflict.